About the World Federation of NDEThe World Federation of Nondestructive Evaluation Centers was founded at an international meeting held in Snowbird, Utah, in July 1998. Founding members include leading NDE research centers in Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, China, India, Korea, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United States with a permanent secretariat at Iowa State University. As a part of the formation of the World Federation, a Memorandum of Understanding was developed which has now been signed by the director at each of the 14 founding centers and a senior administrator (generally at the level of Provost) at their home institutions.
The motivation for the formation of the World Federation is to improve NDE technology and its uniform application on a worldwide scale. A number of global drivers, each with significant impact on the quality of life, contribute to this motivation. Included are demands fostered by population growth, environmental concerns, economic competition, and easing of world tensions.
One consequence of these drivers has been the increased globalization of industrial production, which raises NDE challenges associated with maintaining quality, safety, and reliability while minimizing life-cycle costs. These issues are found in areas as diverse as manufacturing, energy, electronics, infrastructure, communications, transportation, and mining. An additional opportunity is the application of the noninvasive measurement procedures developed by the NDE community to related fields such as medical diagnostics and precision agriculture. The members of the World Federation are motivated to find cost-effective ways to pursue precompetitive, cooperative NDE research in support of these and related endeavors, and to pursue opportunities for exchange of faculty, students, and other scientific personnel. Both will improve the overall technical infrastructure of the involved countries.
It is the vision of the founding members of the World Federation to provide significant leverage in meeting the growing needs of a global economy. In order to gain these advantages, focus is to be placed on the following objectives:
- The selection and performance of highly leveraged, collaborative quantitative NDE research projects and applications that lead to excellence and improved cost effectiveness in global NDE engineering practice.
- The exchange of faculty, researchers and students among cooperating centers.
- The development of educational and training materials.
- The pursuit of outreach programs with national and international industry groups for promoting worldwide safety, product quality and economic well being of people.
- The extension of measurement science and technology developed in the NDE field to application areas such as agriculture.
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